For my 11th grade English class we had to write several research papers. For these papers our teacher taught us how to take notes, how to cite books and websites, copyright laws, and proper MLA formatting along with a lot of other stuff that I have long forgotten. The one thing that I do remember and have used continuously since that class was that you always want to have more then one source supporting your work. The teacher always stressed if you can only find a fact in one resource then you should question that fact and most likely leave it out of your paper. This one piece of advice is the same piece of advice I give to my students when they are finding information on the Internet. I don’t think this is the end all to making sure a source is reliable but I do think it can help especially with all the other techniques we discussed in our class. If you can find multiple sites to back up the information that you are looking at then I think you are headed in the right direction. This one piece of advice is trying to get them to think critically about the information they are finding.
With the introduction of the Internet, research has gone from a simple task of looking up information to a more complex task needing higher end critical thinking skills. Ithaca College has a guide to navigating the Internet titled “A Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web”. Students need to constantly question whether the site they are on and the information they are looking at is legitimate. The critical thinking skills they use to distinguish this can then be applied to all areas of their lives. Since I teach high school, this is a skill that is easier to teach, since their brain is more developed. It is also a very important skill for them to have since they will soon be released into the “real world” left to fend for themselves.
Have you actually used this (the Ithaca College exercise) with your students...I like it!
ReplyDeleteI like how the Ithaca exercise has the link about when in doubt, doubt! Students automatically believe what the read all the time on the internet. I wonder if they were to experience how easy it is to publish something on the internet, if their thoughts would change? Maybe an activity to show them how anyone can post anything would be appropriate. This idea is not stressed enough and I was happy to see that the website included that.
ReplyDeleteThe "Web Pages from Pages Found on the Web" link on Ithaca's ICYouSee page is very important to share with students. So easily we forget to distinguish between scholarly works and web pages! (at least I do!) Also, I was never shown Google Scholar until late in college, but could have used this resource in junior high (if not, intermediate years of elementary school).
ReplyDeleteI wish I had a class that taught me how to "research". While I do look for multiple references to support an idea, I didn't really think about doing it. Guess it seemed to be common sense to me. That was in the world of hard-copy. It is so important now that there is so much information available on the web. There are many people out there that think they know what they are talking about, but when challenged, it is apparent they don't. Great advise ... keep giving it to your students. They need to question what they find on the internet!
ReplyDeleteI remember following this rule in HS - however, since then I've forgotten it. Thanks for the refresher for whenever my kids have to look something up.
ReplyDeleteI did not use the Ithaca College exercise yet. Next year I am going to try and use it.
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